I Made a Skillshare Class

So I've just published my very first Skillshare class. Yes, that Skillshare, the one you’re always seeing ads for on YouTube. I joined Skillshare in mid-October because I had been job hunting for over a month and, frankly, was very bored. Skillshare is always free for the first month, so I thought, why not? You can sign up on their website or via someone’s link.

Hint: Sign up via my link and you’ll get free Skillshare and I get commission. It’s a win-win.

Sign-up for Skillshare via my link.

If you’re already on Skillshare, you can find my class here:

Find my class on Skillshare.

Anyways, I learned many things within that first month, from professional skills like freelancing, budgeting, and creating your own website (yes, I made the very website you’re on because of a Skillshare class), to fun classes like propagating succulents and flower arrangements (I like plants). These have been extremely valuable to me because I am preparing to leap into freelance writing, and so much information out there is extremely hard to find. There are also a whole host of courses on things like marketing or coding or drawing if that’s your thing. Really, they’ve got nearly everything. For me, the really exciting part was the classes Skillshare made with some of my favorite contemporary authors like Roxane Gay and Hanif Abdurraqib. You’d be surprised at the amount of famous faces that show up.

So after a month of watching, I got an email about a Teacher Challenge. Every month, Skillshare hosts a group where users create their own classes using various checkpoints and resources along the way. Also, there’s prizes. At this point, still unemployed, I thought, why not? And thus, my Skillshare class was born.

Don’t get me wrong, creating a class wasn’t easy. There’s a lot of outlining, graphic creating, scripting, filming, and editing that goes into it. Yet at the same time, it was totally doable by a person like me, who has only limited film-making skills. I made this class on my handheld Canon and Windows Movie Maker. I may be biased, but I think it looks pretty good.

I chose to make a class about poetry writing because that’s what I know best and I thought it would be a somewhat unique topic. Initially, I was going to make video that goes over the entire poetic process from drafting to editing to publishing, but then I thought that was a bit much. So this first class is just about a few techniques I use to generate poetic ideas and how to form them into a draft. In the future, I hope to tackle the other aspects of editing and publishing.

I do hope you’ll consider joining Skillshare, especially if you are at all interested in the digital media landscape. Also, did I mention that it’s free?